Media’s responsibility to climate change
The UK tabloids and US broadsheets were both in the news this week for their poor coverage of climate change. Poor in either volume (US) or tone and accuracy (UK).
In the UK, The Guardian picked up on new research carried out by Max Boykoff and Maria Mansfield at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, reporting on the coverage of climate change in the tabloid press (.PDF). They analysed 974 articles published between 2000 and 2006 in the Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Mirror, and found that:
UK tabloid coverage significantly diverged from the scientific consensus that humans contribute to climate change. Moreover, there was no consistent increase in the percentage of accurate coverage throughout the period of analysis and across all tabloid newspapers. Findings from interviews indicate that inaccurate reporting may be linked to the lack of specialist journalists in the tabloid press. (Boykoff and Mansfield, 2008)
These are in line with findings in another paper, by Neil Gavin at the University of Liverpool, presented at the Political Studies Association conference in Bristol, September 2007. Gavin found a similar paucity of content in the tabloids, which was, again in line with Boykoff and Mansfield, that tabloid coverage has been consistently low over the period. It’s worth a closer look at the issue… Read more
‘An honest reckoning’ for climate discourse
I’m not holding it together very well today. Natural personal sensitivities aside, I’ve this morning read James Risbey’s excellent paper: “The new climate discourse: Alarmist or alarming?” published in the peer-reviewed Global Environmental Change, (Issue 18: 2008, pages 26-37). It is, well, alarming.
A quick summary. The papers asks: is the discourse that talks of climate change as ‘catastrophic’, ‘rapid’, ‘irreversible’, ‘worse than we thought’ etc. either alarmist rhetoric, or is it in line with the actual science? Risbey’s analysis finds that these terms, used by NGOs, green activists, politicians and scientific spokespersons to urge for action (and reported in the media as such), are not exaggerated rhetoric or over-the-top; they are in fact in line with scientific consensus. It is worth taking one example in some detail. Read more
Local newspapers connecting the networks
My new local newspaper, the Sunderland Echo, is inviting readers to write its headlines in its own ver
sion of networked journalism. Networked journalism, as I’ve writen about before, is the collaborative development of the ‘newswork’ that brings the traditional media institutions closer to the citizen journalists, or produsers, who are seeking out and taking new opportunities to participate in media, rather than just consume it. Here it’s just for fun, as reported on Holdthefrontpage.co.uk:
Every Friday morning [Magic] radio presenter and Echo columinst Steve Colman gives listeners a teaser from one of the day’s stories and challenges them to compose a witty and fitting headline. So far the scores stand at 11 to 8 in favour of the radio listeners.
The Sunderland Echo also runs an OnCampus page, where it publishes stories gleaned from the journalism programme of Sunderland University - another example or facet of networked journalism, where the content comes from citizen produsers, even if they are a little further along the spectrum than the ‘out-there blogger’.
What is also good to remember from this example is the cross-media networks that still play an important role in the marketing and audience development strategies of the mainstream news media. When I worked for the internet arm of GWR Radio back in 2000, the buzz then was of the cross-promotional benefits of radio and web working together; it was also the buzz for the BBC, particularly programmes such as Newsnight, which was benefitting from cross-promotion across BBC News 24, BBC.co.uk and the radio.
And while we don’t think so excitedly about the ‘buzz’ any more, as in the Sunderland Echo example, the intra-networks of journalism remain just as important as the extra-networks, as illustrated by this article in The Observer last week, on BBC news coming together. As newsroom chief Peter Horrocks says, the integration is meant to provide a more coherent overview for news production within the BBC to meet the demands of the digital age. It’s also, as is made clear, about cost-savings, and some people think it’s a bad move.
‘Balance as bias’ in climate change reporting
In a New York Times Dot Earth post on ‘Climate and the Web’, author Andy Revkin reflects on how digital media and culture can contribute to the tackling of climate change. But the article continues to support the journalistic norm of reporting with ‘balance’ which, in the case of climate change, distorts the real and certain consensus on the role of humans in creating the crisis.
The Dot Earth blog is a leap forward in climate coverage in the US elite mainstream press. These are the top four newspapers of the NYTimes, Washington Post, LA Times and Wall Street Journal that Boykoff & Boykoff call the “Prestige Press” in their paper ‘Balance as Bias’ (2004), published in the peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change. Andy Revkin’s blog is clear, concise, and mainly constructive in its communication of the impact of human behaviour on greehouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, and its dangerous consequences. So, I believe Andy in this sense is doing a good job.
However, while Andy and his publisher the NYTimes.com are “conducting an experiment” to deconstruct Bush’s most recent speech on climate change, I think Andy is also contributing to the phenomenon of informational ‘balance as bias’ that Boykoff & Boykoff identified in their 2004 paper.
The ‘balance as bias’ argument is one that shows how the journalistic norm of the balanced reporting of two sides of a particular issue is problematic when one side is so overwhelmingly supported by the factual and scientific consensus, and when the other side is hugely lacking in the same level of scientific fact and peer-reviewed consensual agreement. And in regards to climate change, in the words of James Baker at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “[t]here’s a better scientific consensus on this than on any issue I know - except maybe Newton’s second law of dynamics.”
Providing equal attention to the two sides in this case (and Boykoff and Boykoff’s research over a 14 year period from 1988-2002 showed that 53% of articles gave ‘roughly equal attention’ to both sides) is a hugely disproportionate response to the actual peer-reviewed scientific support for the ’sceptical’ view. So why do U.S. journalists keep doing this? Read more
The hybrid newswork
Yesterday I talked through the different aspects of ‘citizen journalism’ and ‘networked journalism’ with my social media class (first PR students, then journalists). As I’ve already expressed, ‘networked journalism’ is I believe the more important for the future survival of the mainstream news industry. It also comes as a relief for the old institutions (as long as they change) becuse it communicates a model, fast being implemented (for example by OhMyNews in Korea) that retains the institution at the centre of the ‘newswork’ (the production of the objects of news, that makes up the news agenda).
‘Networked journalism’, well summarized by Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine.com, was discussed by Jo Bardoel and Mark Deuze in their article ‘Network Journalism’ published in the Australian Journalism Review (23.3) back in 2001. Mark Deuze’s more recent article ‘Preparing for an Age of Participatory News’ (Journalism Practice 2007 (1.3)) quotes Jarvis, who has the talent for the turn of phrase, describing networked journalism as the process that:
“takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives.”
Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine.com (2006)
And the UK regional market is a seedbed of some of the best pioneering work in this area. Read more
Long live ‘networked journalism’
Citizen journalism is the process by which the group (formerly known as the audience) plays an active role in news and information gathering, reporting, editing and dissemination. Here’s the definition from Wikipedia. It is the process by which people like you and me, outside of official media institutions (e.g. The Times, BBC), start up blogs, post images to Flickr and videos to Youtube, and begin to change the debate by providing access to stories that remain untold by those ‘official media institutions’. Talking of which, this video is entertaining… Read more
Climate science reporting: detecting bias
The Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group News (ClimateSci.org; one of Nature magazine’s Top 50 Science Blogs) has reported what it considers to be a case of bias against its research by EOS, the online publication of AGU, a “a worldwide scientific community that advances, through unselfish cooperation in research, the understanding of Earth and space for the benefit of humanity”.
The allegation is the result of the refusal to publish their article, based on a survey of climate scientists, that suggests “there is not a universal agreement among climate scientists about climate science as represented in the IPCC’s WG1“.
The results of the ClimateSci.org survey, of 140 climate scientists, reported these results:
- No scientists were willing to admit to the statement that global warming is a fabrication and that human activity is not having any significant effect on climate [0%].
- In total, 18% responded that the IPCC AR4 WG1 Report probably overstates the role of CO2, or exaggerates the risks implied by focusing on CO2-dominated Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), to a greater or lesser degree.
- A further 17% expressed the opinion that the Report probably underestimates or seriously underestimates the consequences of anthropogenic CO2 -induced AGW and that the associated risks are more severe than is implied in the report.
- The remaining 65% expressed some degree of concurrence with the report’s science basis
ClimateSci.org then tried to get this published in EOS, and Nature Precedings. They were turned down by both.
How should an environmental journalist respond to this? Read more
Esquire recreate cover from 1965
Have I said I love magazine covers? Esquire’s May 2008 magazine reimagines the 1965 cover that pictured Italian actress Virna Lisi, in town filming Assault on a Queen with Frank Sinatra. Shaving. In the magazine shoot, not the film.
The story in Esquire is told by the art director at the time, George Lois, who they say “created some of the most memorable covers in the magazine’s history”. Lois’s commentary is stark about the mercantile pressures he felt at the time (but got away from):
“The ad guys hated it. It was too edgy. They were worried about losing clients.”
In the recently released 2nd edition of The Magazine from Cover to Cover, Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatel focus on the same point: “how much influence advertisers have on the editorial content and the variety of means by which they exert their power.” One of my Level 2 magazine journalism students who’s doing some good features is also doing some work experience with a magazine over in Liverpool. He had an eye-opener the other day, when
he sat in on his first editorial meeting. “Do the ad team always have control like that?!” he asked. Why, yes they do.
I’m intrigued about the resonance that a magazine cover has when it pastiches, parodies, copies, morphs, etc, another image, either a previous magazine cover, or another famous marque or image. For example, the outcry over the recent Time Green cover and its pastiche of the famous Marines putting up the US flag at Iwo Jima.
Here, the two Esquire magazines are not so different: two women shaving, an image that was originally inspired by a 1965 article on the ‘masculinization of the American woman’. (Haven’t read the article).
There are a couple of obvious differences. Read more
Time goes green (or, in Europe, Brown)
The hymn-book of the Stetson-wearing businessman, Time magazine, has used its cover to make a loud pronouncement on climate change.
In its 84-year history, the newsweekly has only twice swapped its red border for another colour. Volume 171, No.17 has gone green for its April 28 issue, its third annual special environment issue.
The last time Time changed its famous border colour (the subject of many a semiotics class) was for 9/11, when the cover border went black. Time magazine is owned by CNN.
I’m fascinated by the power of magazine covers to make statements of such cultural force and meaning in such a small, relatively simple space.
In their new book The Magazine from Cover to Cover, Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatel,
suggest that a magazine “opens the world to us. It helps us build our foundation, our beliefs”, and that magazines “create the symbolic meaning that we use to interpret our world”. They rarely do this individually; it is a matter of millions of magazine covers and articles accumulating as forms or objects of the mediatised world. But sometimes–like Time this week–individual examples of the magazine genre remind us of their collective force as producers of cultural meaning.
And Steve Taylor, in his book 100 Years of Magazine Covers, suggests that (quoted from a book review by Jenny McKay, University of Stirling) “a magazine cover, by distilling the essence of a publication, is especially revealing. For Taylor, magazines and their covers
provide their readers with ‘the raw material of identity’ that we now no longer get
from traditional social and family institutions (p. 9).”
Before I get onto the actual images used, and the responses, why, you ask, can’t I buy this in the UK? Well, because Time Green is only for the US, Asia and the Pacific regions. Here in Europe, we get Time Brown:
Lucky us. Anyway, so, much of the reception to Time’s green cover is actually in response to the pastiche of the famous Iwo Jima image of marines putting up the American flag, which here has, of course, been replaced with a tree… Read more
Neuroscience and the Kyoto Protocol Pt2
I believe a method that approaches the Kyoto Protocol (and other international agreements) as an ‘object of research’(.doc) (Fairclough, 2000) through the application of neuroscientific understanding would show that such documents of law, the environment, politics and of the international, can be read as indicators of the individual and collective human executive functions of the brains of the people involved in agreeing the documents.
This would encompass the negotiators but most explicitly the politicians, but would not exlcude the other influencers, including the electorate, NGO, business and media. Documents such as the Kyoto Protocol are then moments of illumination of the collective workings of the higher cognitive functions of those involved in their decisions and agreements; and because the extent that these decisions reach as far as the electorate, their collective higher cognition should be taken into account in the analysis.
Well, so that’s the hypothesis. And it turns around the crux of reciprocity as I suggested in an earlier post. The point is that reciprocity in human congitive behaviour and its influence on decision-making is a function of the higher cognitive executive system in the human brain, parts such as the human striatum, as reported by Alan Sanfey, and which have a significant role in social decisions whether or not to reciprocate (Science, 2007). From where I turn to read this:
Nations and individuals typically are unwilling to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions unilaterally, because in doing so they would pay the full price of abatement but gain only a fraction of the benefits. Indeed their sacrifice may be futile if other actors do not exhibit a similar constraint.
Harrison and Sundstrom (2007)
Here, for self-interest, the authors could be seen to say Read more
